Lincoln Paper tissue machine ready to start

LINCOLN – Lincoln Paper & Tissue LLC’s new $36 million tissue machine was installed on schedule and will be operational shortly, mill co-owner Keith Van Scotter said Wednesday.

“The system has been under test for weeks,” Van Scotter said. “It will be online any day now.”

Seen as a key element in the pulp, paper and tissue mill’s plans, the tissue machine’s activation will double the plant’s capacity from 50 to 100 tons of white tissue per day. It added about 40 full-time workers to the plant’s 354-member, $21 million payroll, and will alleviate the workload on the plant’s two 50-ton capacity tissue machines, company officials said when the expansion was announced a year ago.

The new workers were hired and have been working for several weeks, Van Scotter said.

The $36 million investment is the latest in a bunch of good economic news that helps Lincoln grow, Town Manager Glenn Aho said. Besides several ongoing upgrades to Penobscot Valley Hospital of Lincoln, the town has seen a groundbreaking for a new veterans clinic, a record sale of shorefront property on several of the town’s 14 lakes this year and several business expansions along West Broadway.

“Having the new machine go online creates another stronghold for Lincoln’s economic future,” Aho said.

The $36 million deal illustrates how even the most local economic revitalization often combines public and private, state, national and international investment and cooperation, particularly with manufacturing.

About $35 million of the investment came from PCG Capital Partners of La Jolla, Ca., the private equity investment arm of Pacific Corporate Group LLC. As part of the deal, the company got a noncontrolling stake in the company and named two representatives to the mill’s board of directors.

A key element to the new tissue machine, a Yankee tissue dryer, was built by Metso Paper Co. of Karlstead, Sweden for about $1.6 million. The dryer departed the port of Antwerp in Belgium aboard the 800-foot cargo ship ACL Compass on April 2 and arrived in Lincoln on May 10.

Former Connecticut residents, Van Scotter and his business partner, John Wissman, were among several potential investors lured to the Eastern Pulp and Paper Co. site by Gov. John Baldacci and state economic development officials in the wake of Eastern’s shutdown on Jan. 16, 2004.

The two investors completed their $23.7 million purchase of the plant in May 2004.

Town and state officials helped make the investment and company’s future more secure by giving the company $6.8 million in tax breaks over the next 20 years under a TIF agreement. The town will get $6.4 million in economic improvement funds, including funds for its first industrial park, as part of the deal, which the Town Council unanimously approved last fall.

A more formal announcement of the machine’s activation, which was due this month, will come in a day or two, Van Scotter said.